Beaux and Balls
by Temple Cloud
Summary: In the Darths and Droids universe, Georgette Heyer's historical romances do not exist, and neither does most of the Vorkosigan saga. But a group of gamers are about to invent them...


It was Ben's fault for being such a pedant, they all agreed later. If Ben (and Jim, who was, after all, a geologist), hadn't kept pointing out all the Game Master's scientific inaccuracies in the space campaign, the GM wouldn't have lost his temper with Ben and Jim (and Pete, who had read every science fiction novel ever written) for knowing more science than he did, and decided that if Ben and Jim and Pete (and Annie, who had read up a lot on science since she and Jim started getting interested in each other) didn't like the way he did science fiction, well, fine, they could play a – a – a _historical_ campaign set in eighteenth-century England instead!

In fairness to the GM, he had done his best to create dramatic plotlines involving spies, smuggling rings, and murders. He had allowed for constant uncertainty over how many players would actually turn up to a session, especially as Jim and Annie were still on the verge of splitting up over Annie's decision to have her Jedi hero in the space campaign be evil. Sensing that the two of them might be splitting up, Pete had done his best to attract Annie's interest by making his character in the historical campaign genuinely evil (and not, as he did with R2, trying to insist that he was in fact Chaotic Neutral and just happened to have a Gollum-like fixation with Artifacts of Power). Jim decided that his Thief character was actually a Robin-Hood-style Chaotic Good rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold, and that Pete's character was his mortal enemy. As the in-game conflicts threatened to spill over into real ones, somehow Ben had found himself landed with the role of being the villain's Lawful Good best friend, who is convinced that there is good in him somewhere and is trying to turn him back to the Light Side. He gritted his teeth and reminded himself that this was only role-playing. He didn't have to believe Pete had a Light Side in real life.

Ben's sister Sally hadn't wanted to bother with this game, at least initially. She was practically a teenager by now, as she frequently reminded him, and old enough to find it _totally embarrassing_ that her older brother and his friends, who were _supposedly grown-ups_, still wanted to play make-believe. Besides, she was busy, what with starting horse-riding lessons. Ben bit back any comments about how it hadn't been so long ago that she had insisted on bringing a pink plastic pony to gaming sessions, and was she _sure_ her current obsession was a sign that she'd put aside childish things?

'Pete, you're in Paris,' the GM began, at the opening of the fourth session. 'It's three years after Diana Beauleigh got married to John Carstares …'

'No, no, that was my alias as a thief!' protested Jim. 'I'm Anthony, Lord Merivale.'

'And I decided to go with "Jennifer", not "Diana", because everyone kept shortening it to "Anna" and not being clear whether they were talking about me or my character,' Annie reminded them.

The GM sighed. 'Pete, does your character still go by "Devil"?'

'I'm Justin "Satanas" Alastair, Duke of Avon,' Pete announced.

'What? I thought you were Duke of _Andover_,' protested the GM. 'Anything _else_ people want to change?'

'Can I change my mind about having that idiotic sister-in-law?' put in Jim hopefully.

'No, I've got plans for that NPC,' said the GM.

'Okay, okay, but does she _have_ to be my sister-in-law? Can't she just be Pete's – Devil's – Justin's sister instead?'

'I don't see how siblings could have such widely disparate Intelligence scores,' retorted Pete.

'Why can't everyone just stick to what they've written on their character sheets?' shouted Ben. 'Everyone's changing their names, Pete _for no reason whatsoever_ switched from Chaotic Evil to Chaotic Neutral at the end of the last session – you're changing your minds even more often than _Sally!_'

The doorbell rang.

'What are you doing here?' Ben asked. 'I thought you said you'd got Fencing Club this evening?'

'No, it's cancelled,' Sally explained. 'Anyway, Pete emailed me about this game, and I thought it sounded pretty good after all.'

'Sally's emailed me a copy of her character sheet, and it looks impressive. I've done a few tweaks to your backstory that your character wouldn't know about, Sally, but you'll work them out in due course. And congratulations on being willing to play someone who isn't an alien or a robot.'

Sally grinned. 'Well, if Pete can manage it, anyone can!'

'Anyway, we were just starting. Pete, you're walking down a street in Paris, three years after, excuse me, _Jennifer_ got married to _Anthony, Lord Merivale_. It's late at night, and you're in a disreputable part of town notorious for its footpads.'

'And you're wearing red high-heeled shoes, a long purple cloak with pink lining, a purple satin coat with gold embroidery all over it, a silk waistcoat with a flowery pattern, and lots of necklaces of sapphires and diamonds. And lots of make-up.'

'Like Darth Maul?' suggested Jim.

'No, more like Padmé. And he's got black velvet patches stuck to his face with jewels round the edges.'

'Sally, you can't just _decide_ for other people what their characters are like!' protested Ben. 'Pete's character isn't gay – is he, Pete?'

'No, no, that's okay,' said Pete. 'It's the eighteenth century – the height of blingy fashion for men, gay _and_ straight. As a powerful duke, I'd want to flaunt my wealth.'

'Just because _you're_ in a job where men wear…' Ben began, but the GM brought them firmly back to the game.

'As you're walking down this dark alleyway, dressed in a conspicuous display of wealth, a slender figure launches itself at you.'

'I grapple with him!' said Pete.

Everyone groaned. 'Can't you just chop his head off?' asked Jim. 'You've got your sword, right? And rolling dice for grappling takes _all night!_'

'Shush! I've been re-reading the grappling rules manual, and I've got some new ideas I want to try.'

Since Sally (who was playing the character who had just barrelled into the Duke of Avon) was _not_ an expert on every detail of the grappling rules, and Pete had maximised Justin for Strength and Dexterity, the Duke soon overpowered his assailant. 'How _dare_ you try to pick my pocket?' Pete snarled.

'Roll for Perception,' the GM said.

Pete rolled a 15.

'By the light of a street lamp, you see…'

'A _street lamp?_' Ben interrupted. '_When_ is this game set again?'

'In the 1750s,' said the GM brusquely.

'And they have street lighting?'

'Yes, candles in glass boxes. King Louis XIV made them compulsory in 1667. They're hung from ropes stretched across the streets. Householders pay a tax which covers street cleaning and street lighting. Can we get on with the story now, or would you prefer to go on arguing?' asked the GM, irritated.

'No, I don't _want_ to argue with you about everything,' protested Ben. 'You've obviously done a lot of research on Early Modern French history.'

'You are enlightened!' snapped the GM. '_Anyway_, Pete, by the light of the _tallow candle street-lamp_, you see that your assailant is a delicate, aristocratic-looking teenage girl...'

'Boy!' interrupted Sally.

'What? You said in your email…'

'I've changed my mind. You said you'd _tweaked some of my backstory_ without _asking_ me first. Girls in those days didn't really get to _do_ much, did they? So if I'm going to have adventures, I need to be a boy, otherwise you probably won't let me have horse-riding and sword-fighting skills.'

'No, it's fine, I left that bit as it was. You're a country child, so you've got good horse-riding skills. The village priest taught you to read and write, and then when you came to Paris, working in your brother's inn where there were lots of English customers gave you the chance to learn English...'

'Were there tavern brawls where I learned bare-fist fighting? What about sword-fighting? I don't want to be a soppy heroine who just gets abducted and then rescued!'

'You don't have to be a boy to be cool,' said Annie gently. 'There are plenty of cool female characters in this game, too.'

'What've you done so far?' Sally asked.

Annie considered. 'Uh - Justin abducted me, and then Anthony rescued me and we got married.' She bristled defensively. 'Part of being an actor is knowing how to play different _kinds_ of characters, okay? I just felt that after playing Anakin for three campaigns running, I needed a stint of being someone who _didn't_ go round murdering children.'

'And she even managed to get _Pete_ to understand the concept of character development!' put in Jim, looking proud of his clever girlfriend. 'He got three extra Empathy points for accepting that she loved me – I mean, that Jennifer loved Anthony – well, both really – and five extra Wisdom points for learning that he wasn't an irresistible babe magnet – that Justin isn't, I mean, Pete already knew _he_ wasn't.'

Sally weighed up these arguments. 'I want to play a boy,' she said.

The GM sighed. 'Have it your way. Pete, you see that your assailant is a delicate, aristocratic-looking teenager with curly red hair, long dark eyelashes and dark violet eyes.' (He scribbled a note here, and slid it across to Pete.) 'This person pleads with you...'

'Monsieur, I am not a tief!' whimpered Sally, in a fair attempt at a French accent. 'I am running from my bruzzer! 'E beats me, and 'is wife is cruel also!'

'I'm not interested. The _last_ ill-treated slave kid we adopted talked me into blowing up a perfectly good space dreadnought instead of stealing it.'

'Ah! Monsieur likes ze epic space battles?'

'Oui.'

'Moi aussi!'

'Comment t'appelles-tu?'

'Leon.'

The GM decided it was time to intervene. 'A hulking, coarse-looking innkeeper approaches.' He adopted a rather less convincing French accent than Sally's. 'Ah, you 'ave my worseless, idle young frere. Do you want to buy 'im?'

'Ten Euros,' said Pete.

'Sacre bleu! You would 'ave me sell my own flesh and blood for ten _Louis_?' (The GM did his best to emphasise the correct currency for the period. 'Five 'undred!'

'No, I meant you pay me ten Louis, and I'll take him off your hands, and not report you to the _gendarmes_ for sending him to pick my pocket.'

The GM gave as Gallic a shrug as he could manage. '"D'accord." The innkeeper hands you ten Louis, and retreats into the shadows.'

'I sell the kid to the nearest brothel, telling them it's a hermaphrodite and worth extra. I go to the casino.' As far as Pete was concerned, this game was sliding much too far in the direction of personal relationships and character development, and even the hint on the GM's note that the mysterious boy/girl held the key to getting revenge on his arch-enemy wasn't enough to interest him right now. He had selected his dexterity skills (amongst others) to optimise his performance as a gambler, and so far most of the important scenes involving card or dice games had been tucked away in the characters' backstories.

'Cast an Empathy roll to see whether you have the heart to do that to a defenceless waif,' the GM told him. 'If you fail, you can sell Leon. If you roll fifteen or more, you adopt him as your son. Anything in between, you give him a job as your servant.'

'And – how much of a penalty have I got because of who this waif is related to?'

'Minus two.'

Pete rolled. 'Eleven! Hah! With the penalty, I _just_ lose.'

'No, you don't,' pointed out Ben. 'You gained three extra empathy points when you levelled up in the last session, remember?'

'Whose side are you on?' snapped Pete.

'I'm on the side of keeping track of your character notes.'

'Can he roll again?' Sally asked.

'The only game we've had that rule in is the space campaign, and then only if someone's playing a Jedi,' the GM reminded her. 'Justin doesn't have Fate Manipulation powers.'

'No, but as a cad, I've got cheating skills,' pointed out Pete. 'We've established that I even have manipulating-other-people-to-cheat-and-let-their-brothers-take-the-blame skills. If I can do that, surely I can fudge a simple dice roll!' Before anyone could stop him, he rolled again, and glared at the result. Sixteen.

'You can't allow that one!' protested Ben. 'No way am I letting Justin adopt Leon!'

Sally yawned.

'Uh, can we wrap this up soon?' asked Ben. 'Sally's got school tomorrow.'

Pete nodded. 'I take Leon back to my hotel, and order my servants to give him a meal and a bath and put him to bed.'

'I can bath myself and put myself to bed!' said Sally indignantly. 'I'm not a _baby!_'

Pete made a note. So did Ben. Ben wondered whether Pete's note also read, 'Definitely a girl disguised as a boy,' and if so, whether his character would have to prevent Justin from behaving inappropriately to Leon. He was _fairly_ sure that his little sister's friendship with Pete in real life was innocent (or non-sexual, at any rate – Pete's variety of innocent friendship included encouraging a twelve-year-old to read Machiavelli in order to help her understand politics).

The campaign concluded a few weeks later with Justin and Leonie's wedding. 'Should we go on and do Beaux And Balls – The Next Generation?' suggested Annie. 'After all, this may _look_ like a happy ending, but any offspring of those characters is going to be a seriously disturbed youth with violent tendencies…'

'You're missing playing Anakin, aren't you?' said Jim sympathetically. 'I still miss Qui-Gonn, too.'

'And men tend to choose wives who resemble their mothers, so he'd be convinced that the only possible woman for him would be an exotic, sword-fighting, unconventional tomboy like Leonie, even if the wife he _needs_ to find is the opposite of all that,' Annie went on.

'Yeah!' said Jim. 'That would work in a science fiction setting, too, with a hero with parents from different planets, instead of different European countries.'

'So, if one of his parents was a mutant or an alien, he could be min-maxed for supreme efficiency,' added Pete.

'What if he _isn't_ a mutant?' suggested Annie. 'What if everyone _assumes_ he's a mutant, when in fact he's a normal human who happens to be disabled because – oh, something happened to him while he was still in the womb…'

'Because his mother was ill and needed a medicine that happened to be damaging to foetuses,' put in Ben. At least his medical course was giving him some useful background information for role-playing, he reflected. Learning to be a doctor was starting to feel like playing a part, too – except that instead of being Obi-Wan Kenobi for a few hours on Friday nights, he was going to be stuck with the same role every working day for the rest of his life. 'So he'd be a misfit,' he went on. 'Probably he looks like Shakespeare's Richard III, and he comes from a planet where everyone assumes that someone who looks like that must be evil, so he runs away from home…'

'And makes friends with people from other planets who are hermaphrodites, or have four arms, or are part wolf …' suggested Sally sleepily.

Running away, Ben thought, sounded very tempting. Away from worrying about never coming up to his parents' expectations, away from worrying about whether his father would die of disappointment if he failed an exam, or if he came home and announced that he'd decided he didn't want to be a doctor anyway.

But then, what if that just meant his father leant on Sally to fulfil all his hopes, instead? Older brothers shouldn't let that happen. If the hero they'd been inventing had a younger brother or sister who was in danger, he'd go to the rescue even if it killed him – or even if it left him so badly injured that he had to give up his hard-won freedom, and then work out what he was going to do with the rest of his life.

It was a story that needed to be told. But Ben wouldn't be able to tell it until he had found out the answers for himself.

**Author's Note: **In the universe in which this story is set, Georgette Heyer never turned to writing historical novels, and is (barely) remembered as a writer of contemporary crime fiction. As a result, Regency romances and historical thrillers did not become a mainstay of popular fiction, and so historical literature is dominated by serious reconstructions of the invention of agriculture or bronze-working.

Moreover, a number of science fiction and fantasy novelists, including Diana Wynne Jones, Patricia Wrede, and Lois McMaster Bujold, were not influenced by Heyer's combination of wit, engaging characters and a dramatic plot, and therefore did not create their best loved works, or did not write them as romantic comedies. Bujold's hero Miles Vorkosigan was never born, because _Shards of Honour_ ended with Cordelia locked up in a Betan mental hospital and Aral drinking himself to death on Barrayar long before they had the chance to become Miles's parents.

However, the creators of the webcomic _Darths and Droids_ do still exist, and Temple Cloud is writing a parody of their work set in Sector General, under the title _I Have a Bad Feeling_.


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